The funny thing is that I've now heard of Hashable. It's also the kind of service where any publicity really is good publicity. Would not be surprised to now see them posting record hits.

The original article sounds quite juvenile, even if you think their idea is silly or not: http://www.betabeat.com/2011/03/17/hashable-is-worthless/

I like how it claims hashable is useless because it is useful to insecure people. As if that were a small market, or something people don't care deeply about.

Considering my current impression of Hashable, which is derived from this and the original article. The original article seems to be dead on.

An insecure founder formed a company that builds product for other insecure people who then gather and cherish their fears together.

I think thats awesome!

What better way is there than to market such a product than through Streisand effect?

On a side note, what do you think of possibility that the original manifestation Streisand effect, was in fact just a signal from Barbra to her fans, that she is still as insecure as any of them?

Just wasted five minutes : 1> Journalist trashes Hashable in satirically laced 'opinion' piece 2> Hashable CEO fails to see anything funny and calls journalist/s liar(s) 3> Journalist posts sections of CEO's emails in a follow-up article 4> CEO gets upset and ... the loop shall continue

I like the part about how "“pivot” is start-up talk for “try to make something that’s at least a little less stupid than what you originally made”."

Hang on a minute. This is about an "op-ed" article that included quotes (as in, contained in quotation marks) that don't appear to accurate, investment advice (allegedly comical or otherwise), and outright derogatory comments (without any justification given). Moreover, the follow-up article republished private correspondence without permission, and is trying to justify its trash article based on some sort of journalistic high ground argument.

Frankly, while I wouldn't have put things the same way, I think the guys from Hashable have every right to be upset, and the web site that upset them is lucky not to be discovering the hard way why serious newspapers have a full time legal department. Their posts have been, IMNSHO, about one step in maturity about the five-year-old in the playground who says something really hurtful to another child, and then tries to make things better by saying "But I was only joking!".

Oh, and the blog post about the whole sorry affair seems to think that communications with journalists are somehow exempt from the usual rules regarding privacy, IP rights and, frankly, common courtesy. I suspect this is not a position that either responsible journalists or lawyers would agree with (as the former would have checked if they were on the record in a case of doubt, and the latter wouldn't assume their personal view trumped what the law actually says).

Does the person who wrote the linked blogpost (on spiers.tumblr.com) have any connection to the betabeat.com site that started this whole mess?

I agree about some of your points, but I don't believe that you have any reasonable expectation of privacy when emailing a person you have never communicated with before or that they won't republish your emails without first gaining your permission (IANAL).

What constitutes "off the record"? Is it exactly and only those words? From Mr. Yavonditte's Twitter stream:

http://twitter.com/#!/mikeyavo/status/48902730730844160

"@EvilPRGuy the only part of email they didn't print was me saying that I was not willing to comment publicly - you live and learn"

It's also pretty obvious that his response was meant to convey some intent to sue and not a challenge to a gunfight at high noon.

Anything for some hits, I guess. Slap a custom wordpress theme on it and call it journalism.

I don't know about in the US but in the UK it's certainly the case that there's a default expectation of privacy.

As much as I'd like to think that's true (being in the UK and a privacy advocate myself) I've never seen anything that would "certainly" describe the legal position in this case, such as a precedent from a case in one of the higher courts. Are you just talking about something like the general privacy right under the ECHR, or something more specific to e-mail?

I've found various opinions on-line from UK-based commentators suggesting that if an e-mail isn't explicitly marked or otherwise understood to be confidential, and it didn't contain any sort of privileged information or information that would normally be expected to remain private, then it wouldn't automatically attract protection under any privacy law. Most of these related to an individual republishing messages send on behalf of a corporate body rather than the other way around, though.

There's nothing email specific, although a company couldn't republish an email from an individual without breaching the data protection act.

If the information in an email has no indication (explicit or implicit) that it should remain private, then I agree there's no legal reason why the recipient can't disclose the information from the email

IANAL either, but in light of casual conversations with those who are: you own copyright in any work you create by default, including any communications you send, and furthermore there are expectations of privacy attached to many professional communications by default, though this varies a lot by jurisdiction and the nature of the parties and relationship or potential relationship involved.

You cannot claim "copyright" to prevent a reporter from publishing an email you sent them.

Says who? For example, has anything relevant changed in the US (which seems to be the relevant jurisdiction here) since this post by a lawyer in 2007?

http://arborlaw.biz/blog/2007/07/17/legal-issues-in-forwardi...

A few minutes of Google-fu finds several essentially similar articles over the past few years.

No matter how much you focus your nerd powers, you are not going to prove that's it's unlawful for a reporter, having received an email addressed to the reporter, to report on that email. Please stop trying.

You did read the article I posted that was written by a lawyer, right? Or spend even two minutes Googling for similar articles by other lawyers?

I think one of us is trying to convince himself that he's right despite the absence of any supporting data, but I'm afraid you might be mistaken about which of us it is.

I'd respond to your article with quotes to point out how you're misunderstanding it, but I might violate its copyright and subject myself to needless lawsuits. (You can have the last word now; I'll stop being snarky in response.)

betabeat.com--the valleywag without the funny--is owned by the observer of which Elizabeth Spiers is the Editor in Chief.

Compare that to this: http://bit.ly/gdmYw6 how 37signals responded to a complaint

From a comment at the end of the follow-up article put up by the blog in question.

I guess there will always be kids that want to build the sandcastles and the kids that just want to knock them over.

While it seems hard to believe anyone could take the quoted “Sorry bro, you’re not Hashable enough” as being an actual attributed quote, to avoid confusion the writer should probably have just italicized it.